Drawing Malcolm

The studio is on the top floor lit by bright north-facing

windows. From the floor below comes the angelic sound of singing practice; in a more distant part of the building I can hear tap-dancing, the sound bouncing off the building behind the Institute.

Malcolm, the model, sits in his robe talking to the silver-haired lady. I find Malcolm more inspirational than Antonio despite Antonio’s creamy Mediterranean skin being stretched over a neat and quite delicious, compact body. And I also love Antonio’s unfashionable Hollywood moustache and the small blue butterfly tattooed on his shoulder. I think most of us women look forward to Antonio on account of the fact that he is no taller than ourselves so that a little bit of maternal care enters the sexual equation. Yes, he is beautiful. But for me it's always Malcolm, standing tall, broad and haughtily before us.

Other members of the class are setting up easels, pinning paper to their drawing boards, laying out charcoal and pencils. My long hair is caught up out of the way in a pony-tail and my jeans and smock have the worn and spattered badge of the dedicated artist that I now am. Our teacher, Alan, rolls out a heater and adjusts the huge lighting system that hangs from the ceiling. The room, the Life Class, has a most soothing atmosphere with the industrious scratch and fidget and scrape of pencil and charcoal on paper.

The smell of oil paint lingers from a previous class. At the rest-breaks and the interval this group of mainly mature students relaxes and we turn smiling faces to neighbours. We talk, collect trays of tea from the canteen.

These are the highlights of my week, that one full-day class and this one evening class. Drawing the nude is an absorbing exercise. I am aware that there may be an intellectual conundrum to this activity, all to do with reducing the three to the two-dimensional, to dealing with the geometry of perspective, to turning colour, light and shadow into black and grey and white, to the capacity of a drawing to be not photographic yet to be a true likeness. None of these trouble me too much as I re-create the pose on my sheets of cartridge paper, that twist of the body, the tilt of the head, the way the hipbone presses against the outer wall of flesh or the way the shoulder rises on one side and slumps on the other.

Life has dramatically changed and all due, I’m certain, to that whim of joining the Life Class, encouraged by the boredom of my life and the memory of the pleasures of the Art Class at my school in Singapore, more than half my lifetime ago.

* * *

I am blessed. Yes, I think only in English! As I have done, girl and woman, for half of my thirty-five years. And I point this out only because everyone sees me as an Oriental who may have difficulty understanding English. I speak perfect and colloquial English, speaking it as well as any British person I know and, of course, better than most of my fellow Londoners, better than half those born and bred in this sceptred isle. I wonder why so many speak so badly.

To tell the truth, I may now stumble a little in my Cantonese. Not that I don’t retain certain Chinese traits and these I bring to the surface whenever I choose for I know the allure of the Oriental Woman. And William likes me to emphasize this whenever we are dining out with his business partners, at those deadly dull, oh-so-boring dinners. But these occasions do mean ‘money’ and so I go along with his wishes - well, another Chinese trait is surfacing there, yes, I suppose - so I wear one of my many cheongsams with the highest of splits, have my black hair wound up, my make-up meticulously applied and I put a reserved, disdainful pitch to my head and shoulders and then allow my eyes to flirt with the oh-so-dull men and to warmly, intimately connect with their womenfolk. That dual personality across the dining table takes quite a skill.

As I was saying to myself as I stand before this mirror,

I am blessed, blessed with this slim, athletic body fashioned, I believe, by my past Volley Ball days back in Singapore and maintained today by exercise and jogging. I was also cursed with an unfulfilled life, with a mind that could be wasted and this I had come to realise over these last years. Collecting Chinese, Japanese and English porcelain and pottery, visiting museums and auctions, joining ceramic societies, working part-time for an antique dealer and an auction house have all lost their original appeal. The years of giving time to two charities (at William’s request) have been rewarding but there’s still the need to make something of myself, for myself, by myself. Hence last year’s enrollment in the Life Class.

Since my school days I have enjoyed drawing, just to entertain myself, an activity that absorbed me whilst Mama was touring, a sort of hobby, nothing urgent about it then, but now that has changed. I still love my collection of jugs and bowls but I realise it was a passive thing to do. Whereas drawing is active, creative. It’s not dependent on anyone else. Apart, that is, from having someone in front of me to draw. And preferably the Male Nude. It’s also very hard work.

* * *

Alan nods to Malcolm who sheds his robe and steps past me and onto the dais to rest mainly on his left leg, the right leg as a prop, the right arm is put behind his back and the fingers lock onto the hanging left arm giving a small twist to the body. Malcolm looks up and to the left and closes his eyes.

Always spend a few minutes taking in the figure before starting to draw, advises Alan. The pelvis is the key to the movement of the figure, he says.

What a marvellous thing is a Life Class, giving me Malcolm and Antonio, sometimes Louise, to closely study, to determine the exact nature of the play of light and shade on muscles and bones, there for me to run my own fingers along the shadows of their bodies, albeit holding a pencil or a piece of charcoal against the paper, along the throat, the rib, the flat belly, the thigh, the intricacies of the ankle and foot.

Malcolm is not an athlete but there is a spareness, a hardness to his body, a good muscle tone, someone, I think, who regularly walks or cycles. I gaze at him admiringly. There is a thin, short white scar on the inside of his left thigh. Below the ribs on his right side are two very small pink scars that may be the result of recent keyhole surgery. I love the flat, muscular stomach and the sharp line of the crests of the pelvis on either side that tip and lead the eye down and round to his groin. I love the shoulders and the strong deltoid muscles, the broad chest, the arch of the rib cage and I again run my eyes down the stomach to the penis, down to the knee and the foot. I begin to draw.

On that first night when Malcolm had shed his robe and stepped naked onto the dais to strike a pose I had vividly recalled that distant time in Florence when William and I had walked into the hall and looked up at Michelangelo’s ‘David’. I stood dazed by its beauty, by its overpowering maleness, slowly walking round the figure in a dreamy state. I had no words in English or Cantonese to describe the marble wonder. ‘Of course not!’, I had told myself, ‘That’s the point; words don’t apply’.

Alan has said, ‘Anna, you have a particular talent that I find hard to define. Your drawings are not at all academic but they are, they have, well, there is a superb reality about them; there is a touch of the Primitive in the way you draw. But, My God, they work! It’s something to do with knowing what you want to achieve and having an eye to serve that. I don’t think I can teach you much. I really don’t know what to say. Keep doing what you’re doing. If I can’t teach you anything I can at least provide the model’. Of course he has much good advice, sees things in my work that I don’t see, opens my eyes, coaxes, encourages.

I think Alan can only be ten years older than I. He looked rather severe, forbidding, on that first meeting. But then I saw a transforming smile as he talked to one of our group, a smile of such winning charm that I no longer felt apprehensive. I thought I might befriend him at some time. And we all hear his low, murmuring advice and the sly but gentle humour that brings smiles all around and this has led me to believe I may, after all, have a sense of humour which William has always told me I lacked.

Two weeks ago Alan had leafed through my drawings again and said. ‘I do like these, Anna. They’re quite wonderful, wonderfully strange and beautiful’. I had seen a new respect for me in his manner, another reason for the uncertainty that lies in this new relationship of teacher-student, a change, a tilt away from the authority he has held as my tutor. I was pleased to hear him admire my work. Malcolm had said much the same. He’d come to my easel at a break to see the drawings Alan had spoken about. ‘These are so good, Anna! I do like them’, he’d said, unconcerned at his nakedness so near to me.

I had smiled. There had been a smell of after-shave or perfume mingling with the scent of his body. I had alarmed myself by almost reaching out a hand to touch his hip, a touch which in my mind was already turning into a stroke. I felt at one with my model, my work and with my new intention of taking Alan as my lover. You know we Chinese love to gamble! I felt a seamless attachment, a continuity, a connection of seeing, drawing, holding, enjoying. I had floated home. Life was becoming very good and very slightly dangerous.

Another time Alan said, ‘You place things on the sheet of paper like a true artist; you use the paper like a good choreographer uses the stage. You’re cleverer than you know, Anna. No, that’s not right. No, you have an instinct for placing things just so on the page’.

Well, if there’s one thing Chinese and Japanese artists do well it’s placing things just so on the page, another hidden oriental trait that rises to the surface, one I never knew I had. It’s in the genes, isn’t that what they say?

The last period of the session is given over to quick drawing. The model adopts a pose of frozen movement, a stride forward with an extravagant twist to the torso, a stoop to snatch at something from the floor, or kneeling or falling back with hands clasped against a wound to the chest, poses that can last no more than two or three minutes, sometimes for scarcely one. The intensity of the class in catching the pose so quickly is tangible. Everyone, including Malcolm, smiles at these action poses. Our other model, Louise, a dancer, has been exceptionally clever at this and she frequently brings a round of applause from the circle of artists. Malcolm is less flexible than the trained dancer but he strikes poses as meaningful as those of Louise, he becomes Man, an icon of masculinity, not at all too fanciful a notion, I believe. I prefer Malcolm to Louise. Is there something purposefully erotic in some of Louise’s quick poses or is that because there is a deep if distant echo from my own psyche? Perhaps it is that, perhaps it is myself and not Louise who imbues those dramatic poses with such feelings. Anyway, Malcolm needs only to stand, lie, stretch, sit in all ordinariness and he is at once the figure I want to gaze upon and create an image of on my sheets of creamy white paper. I delve to find a can of fixative in my satchel and spray the soft pencil drawings.

So, here I am, showered, hair in a towel-turban, naked before my mirror thinking to myself ‘I am blessed’. I realise I could always draw myself (‘self portrait of the artist’) but I’m certain the experience would lack that spark, that fire, that odd need to possess the model in some way that the drawing gives me. Can that be the explanation, in the same way that a photographer feels he possesses his model?

Alongside thus making the model mine, I enjoy the development of my skills and the pleasure in striving to produce an image nearer and nearer to what I want.

Not for one moment is my preference for Malcolm, sometimes Antonio with his creamy Mediterranean body, small and compact and quite delicious - where was I? I was distracted, then (and no small wonder, believe me!) by picturing Antonio. Yes, I was thinking: nobody should believe my preference for the male model, the naked male, over Louise is because my marriage is now mainly one of companionship. No, William and I have separate bedrooms and this we have had from the start, something to do with William’s aristocratic and monied family’s past, with their huge houses and the staff to care for them, an enviable tradition of having the luxury of one’s own bedroom. William will come to my room every so often whilst I now never, never go tapping on his door these days, these nights, no, and I’ve made it clear that though I welcome these few visits I’m not seeking him out, thank you. Not that I don’t enjoy these rarish copulations but William knows that I am marking out my independence, drawing a line on our past. He raises no objections; doesn’t ask. Neither of us questions why we are childless. We have not sought to find out whether it is the egg or the sperm that fails us and he says nothing. I really don’t mind. Things have changed. I have come to realise that in the mansion of his mind there are many rooms that are locked away from me (and I suspect from many others). I get no real love from him. I merely decorate his life. We get on well, well enough. We go to the opera and the theatre, we visit the few friends we have, his friends, not mine, for those few friends of mine I keep to myself. Now that Alan has entered my life I now need only William’s brotherly affection, his care, nothing more.

I mustn’t ignore William’s relations, his sister and cousins and their husbands and children. They visit and invite return visits and I get on with them all so perfectly well, more than that, I’m very, very fond of them, yes, we are ‘family’. Happily the sweet, lovely nephews and nieces make their affection for me very clear, particular young Jeremy, Ellena’s child, pretty Jeremy with that mop of blonde hair, that lovely smile and fourteen last February though looking older. ‘You’re a naughty boy, Jeremy!’, I say and he gives me that smile and he says, ‘I can’t help it, Anna!’. The two girls, cousins, are in the sixth forms of their pricey private school and they trust me, confide in me, not to shock me, I’m sure, but to reassure themselves that their and their peers' scandalous behaviour at the parties they attend in this pampered, moneyed milieu is ‘average,’ their term for ‘normal’ which it may well be in their world for all I know since my own transition from adolescence to the adult world took place in a quite different culture. They know their secrets are safe with me. Being someone they still see as an exotic, an ‘import’, I am seen as beyond the boundaries of family taboos. And I mustn’t forget little Andrew, Catherine’s child, coming up to thirteen later this year and maturing fast. And I say ‘little’, but - . Both these boys are now almost my height except when I’m in my high-heels. And to think I bathed them when they came to stay, not all that long ago it seems, a soapy hand around and between, always shampoo in the eyes, scrubbing knees and vigorously toweling their hair and drying between the ticklish toes. How our relationship has changed! Now both of them privately and at different times spread themselves or stretch before me and my drawing board in the privacy of my studio, parents away on other duties, William in Frankfurt or Chicago. What a pleasure it is to draw the young, slender, ribby, boney-hipped figures, that scoop of a flat belly giving such emphasis to the blossoming maleness.

* * *

Melissa will be here this evening on her way back from her work. We have something in common, though her contempt for her husband is far in excess of my own passive tolerance of William and his world. But then again, her Michael is, says William, an unprincipled and crooked financier with dubious relationships abroad. Probably not far off being Mafia, William says. And he should know. At that past dinner I recognised a kindred spirit in Melissa, sitting there amongst the stolid wives and the tarty ‘partners’ all being vivacious and all in the know about food and clothes. Melissa looked as if she was grinding her teeth.

Melissa says, ‘Anna, I knew you were wealthy but I had no idea you were this wealthy. What a superb house!’.

I say, ‘I have some money of my own, Melissa, but everything else is William’s. If I want something then William will buy it or give me the money to buy it. Nevertheless, I live modestly. You can see that. I don’t need to pin bank notes to my dress. I think displaying one’s wealth is vulgar. We share that belief, don’t we’, this being not a question but a statement of fact. I do like Melissa. I sense a genuineness in her. I think she is about ten years older than I but she looks younger than that and very attractive, very alive. As an actress she needs to look like that, I know, although she is in radio, in that daily, so popular, never-ending Rivertown soap that I can never be bothered to listen to. ‘Don’t apologise! Don’t excuse yourself, Anna! I don’t listen to it either. I roll up, say the lines, walk away and make sure I never hear it. It embarrasses me’.

Melissa and I get on together marvellously, joined by husbands with some financial connections and by our loathing of the circle that belongs to her husband, Michael, and to which William is obliged to join quite regularly. She tells me she is edging towards leaving her husband. I don’t blame her.

We are in my studio at the top of the house, sitting on the divan and leafing through my pile of drawings. William is away somewhere as he most often is. Melissa lifts away sheet after sheet and says, ‘They’re wonderful. Strange but wonderfully true. Is it all right to say that, Anna? I do so admire them. And this young boy is so gorgeous!'. She carefully looks at each of the many the drawings. She says, 'Male-ness I love; the men that go with it are, well, less wonderful most of the time. And I have a cousin who runs a gallery, Anna. I'm sure these would sell like hot cakes. Bet you there's a good market out there for stuff that treads such a fine erotic line. Shall I ask him?'.

I decided to tell Melissa how I came to be here. I think she expects me to be psychologically damaged by the slaughter of my parents. Perhaps I am. Who knows? I certainly am not aware that I’m different, scarred from the age of seven. The wide family net cosseted me; my aunt being almost a mother to me, took me further under her wing. My mother, the singer Soo Lee, was away so often on her engagements around Singapore and up and down Malaya that her permanent absence seemed as nothing new. Even now I see clearly her Nefertiti head and shoulders, a face more angular than mine, her eyes extravagantly almondised in blues and gold, lips parted on very slightly protruding teeth and that long throat rising from the stiff collar to give voice to sentimental songs, both English and Cantonese, spinning them out in their heartbreak and yearning. She was famous. She sang in theatres, hotels and at conventions and clubs. She sang on the radio. I have a disc of her songs.

More by osmosis than any direct explanation I came to know that my father fell foul of a protection racket; my mother’s death was simply because she was there to witness his. I don’t even know if anyone was brought to book. I recall the rush of events with our amah and our aunt, of being collected from school, the gathering of clothes and personal belongings. I did see the white wall of our distant sitting room speckled and streaked in red, saw smears of red on the green painted and polished concrete floor of the bungalow as I stood outside beyond the door’s open grill, my hand in the policeman’s hand, my two teddy bears clutched to me by my other hand; I can always recall the sharp crease of his khaki shorts. Oh yes, I did weep as did my brother but we were comforted by the arms of family members and friends and so we never once felt that we were orphaned or alone or unloved, uncared for. At school I worked hard and prospered and at sixteen won the prize for English Language Studies given annually by the British Import-Export Company who supported our Catholic school. I dipped a sort of curtsy to William as he presented his company’s gift to me. Though I wore the school uniform I knew I looked beautiful. William must have heard the story of the killings and a year later when he had re-joined the company in London I was invited to take up a scholarship in London, all at his company's expense. At twenty I was married to him. With my background, Melissa, the sixteen year age difference meant nothing. I married not out of love or lust, Melissa, but affection, gratitude, a relief at entering a calm and secure harbour.

* * *

I rise from the divan and stand at the window. The room retains much of the heat of the day from this Indian Summer, leaving it warm far into the night. The room’s tungsten lamps make the cloudless night sky in the window a vibrant indigo blue. I watch a pulsing red light move from left to right, now being diagonally crossed by a smaller white light, slower, further away. I look back at the divan and the still figure of my tutor, Alan, a still figure as if a model for me to draw. I now know from my anatomy studies the name of every muscle and bone, the way a muscle leeches into or fans out onto a bone. I think I would like to draw him but I know that will never happen. Alan answers my physical and emotional needs in our daytime trysts and his more rare stays over night. He makes me laugh, too. I like his mischievous humour; after a recent night together I found that he had left my two teddy-bears on my bed in the missionary position. Fortunately I found them before Mrs Watson did my room - I want no curiosity aroused in the staff. Previously he had said, ‘You, we, are leading a charmed life, Anna. Is there no danger?’.

I told him I made these arrangements with the utmost care. ‘Well’, Alan said, ‘lets keep our fingers crossed’. I explained that for we Orientals crossed fingers were not a sign of good luck. ‘Look’, I said and held up my hand to show him. ‘See? For us this is a sign for the Gates of Heaven’. Alan smiled at me and sang, ‘I’m knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s Door’.

There is danger according to Melissa. Her husband, she tells me, has many crooked friends who all know someone who will do anything for the right price. If William saw a separation cleaving half his fortune away then Michael, if asked, would be pleased to make certain arrangements. Putting William into his debt and more than that, his clutches, would delight him. I don't think William is capable of that, I said, and I knew I would refuse anything above a subsistence settlement, a nothing payment, peanuts, in relation to his fortune. 'But what about hurt pride? These men are vain. I was thinking of your lover, Anna. A misfortune crossing the street'.

I leave the window and stand in front of the end wall in it’s recent coat of white emulsion. Here will be my ‘David’, an iconic figure of Man, of several Davids, of several versions of Malcolm. On my worktable are the pasted sheets of blown-up photocopies of my drawings forming one large sheet in exact proportion to the wall. I have drawn a grid over this in blue ink to enable me to scale up the design and fill the space. I’ve enjoyed the technical process of organising, preparing this work. I will face the problem of using colour once the figures have been mapped out.

Across the window a helicopter roars faintly, lights flashing, on its way to a hospital roof. Alan stirs in his sleep and turns onto one side. A week ago he had fetched two glasses of orange juice back to the bed and said, smiling, ‘Anna, you appreciate the dimensions and angles of the bed just like a Wimbledon champion knows the Centre Court’. Afterwards I remembered Alan’s earlier comment that I use the page like a good choreographer uses the stage. I smile to myself in the darkness for it is clear to me that my pleasure in drawing the human form, that search to find the perfect image, the Life Class, my models, my studio, my lover, my bed, my body are all wonderfully, wonderfully wrapped up together, intertwined, all connected pleasures to be explored. And I acknowledge there is so much risk, much danger in all this but I don’t care, I welcome this fear, this thrill, it intensifies my pleasure.

William may suddenly surprise and shock me with divorce, the parents of my two nephews may come shouting and shrieking and take me to court, Alan’s wife may phone me with threats and beat on the door. I don't care! When these thoughts trickle into my mind I have a vision of the white wall, red speckled and streaked, see the red smears on the green, polished concrete and I find myself standing very calmly, hand in hand with another, quite different, thrilling and mysterious future. I will have to shrink my horizons, take a small apartment somewhere shabby, count the pennies.
I don't care. I remember a song, a song from long ago, that Mama was always being asked to sing. It was in English and the refrain ran, 'I want to be free, free, free. Free like a bird in the tree', trite words that were transformed by the melody and her voice as they unwound from that long and slender throat.